The tales of television betrayal the Turner nominee is transforming into art

Thursday 23 November 2006 03.42 EST
First published on Thursday 23 November 2006 03.42 EST

The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Friday November 24 2006

It is Jerry Springer: The Opera, not The Musical, as we said in the article below

The Turner prize is always something of a media circus, whether the fuss is about an unmade bed, or a set of lights switching on and off. Never, though, has an artist chosen to play with the media as directly as yesterday, when shortlisted artist Phil Collins held his own press conference in the full gilt-and-mirrors splendour of the Cafe Royal in London.

Collins's submission has always been a little bit different. When visitors to Tate Britain enter his room at the Turner prize exhibition, they see a banal office space complete with printers and pot plants - much like any other more or less dreary workplace.

It is, in fact, the HQ of Collins's production company. His Turner prize project (the winner is announced on December 4) is to create a film in which people who feel their lives have been ruined by reality TV can tell their stories - unedited. As part of a long-term project called Return of the Real, he is investigating, he says, "our ambivalent relationship with the camera as both an instrument of attraction and manipulation, of revelation and shame".

So yesterday nine veterans of reality television each had 10 minutes to say precisely what they wanted about their on-screen experiences. Sitting in a formidable row on a platform at the front of the room, they seemed perfectly unfazed by the circling cameras and the winking flashes - but there again, they are probably used to it. Collins's team was filming the whole event, and at some point the result will appear in a gallery. The press conference was, in other words, an artwork.

Nine women and two men (one wondered whether the imbalance was significant) took turns to address the motley crowd of hacks, Tate curators, and just one Turner prize judge in Lynn Barber, the Observer writer.

All their stories, in one way or another, were about alleged betrayal of trust - trust, admittedly, that had been more or less naively bestowed. The accounts varied in delivery from confident to circuitous and incoherent, and in tone from bathetic to poignant and touching. Amid everything, it was hard not to laugh just a little at Marc Dimino's tale. He had answered an advert appealing for men to spend three weeks on Ibiza, with the possibility of winning £10,000 and spending a week aboard a yacht with a gorgeous lovely.

Unfortunately, the programme makers failed to point out that the lovely in question was what Jerry Springer: The Opera, would call "a chick with a dick" - a pre-operative male to female transsexual. As the woman from the Press Association reasonably inquired, did he not think there might be a catch?

Other tales were darker. George Sweeney, a carefully spoken 50-year-old from Fife, felt television could draw attention to his 12-year-old son's condition - he is autistic - and help the family access expert help. Sweeney believed he was appearing on a show called Families, which, by transmission, had mysteriously switched its name to Teen Tamer: Foul Mouthed and Furious. The autism was not mentioned; instead, claimed Sweeney, his son's behaviour was portrayed as being the result of poor parenting.

Jan Melia was such an articulate and forthright woman, one wondered how her desire for self-improvement as a partner had ever found its conclusion in a decision to appear on Wife Swap. But, she said, she and the producers had been in contact for over two years, and she trusted them. In the programme, she feels she and her husband were misrepresented as a workshy "bad family". The producers, she alleged, had "hassled the children to say things against their dad, which, testament to them, they didn't do. But that sort of thing is akin to torturing in police cells." She referred to an incident which involved a pair of underpants. "The programme suggested that the kids don't wash, and they go without, and the children have been bullied as a result." Her middle child, she says, "was beaten up by a group of eight or nine kids who used words from the voiceover".

During the question and answer session, a curious sense of doubleness took hold. Were we in a "proper" press conference, or were we actors in Collins's creation? "How do you feel about being part of an artwork?" asked the arts correspondent of Channel 4, keeping quiet about his employer, home of Wife Swap and Super Nanny. "How do you?" came back Collins, without a beat. The camera changes things; suddenly asking a question seemed loaded with performance anxiety.

It still seemed curious that these people, whose entanglement with TV has caused them such discomfort, were happy to open up to the press - and have their stories again edited, or even manipulated, in ways they cannot possibly control. But perhaps the worst fate, in the end, is to be ignored.